I haven’t made cupcakes in a while, so I thought I would rectify that. Chocolate Cupcakes with Chocolate Pistachio Frosting, Pistachio Linzer Cookies with Red Currant and Passion Fruit Jam, all packed up in egg cartons for Easter.
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Every year at Easter Time, I make some hot cross buns. It’s pretty traditional, and it’s a Good Friday tradition in the UK. Every year I get a little bored with the recipe as well. So this year, I decided to mix it up and instead of using raisins, cranberries, currants or (as I did last year) dried apricots, I decided to use chocolate covered dried cherries. They we’re a bit big so I did chopped them a little. If you don’t have chocolate covered cherries in particular, I suppose Raisinets would work as well. Or if you like the cherry-chocolate combo, then mini-chocolate chips and some dried cherries. Pleased with the result.
For those of you who follow my baking and cooking, you will know that I really really hate food coloring. I rarely use it and generally find that if it isn’t a color that naturally occurs in something that one would generally eat, you shouldn’t dye it that color. The only thing that I would put in my mouth that is the color of this cake is Pepto Bismol, which didn’t exactly help in the baking. But every now and again, I bow to pop culture and decide to make something silly. Back to the regularly scheduled programming tomorrow.
Also, the last time I made one of these “Cake-Inside” Cakes, I took photos of all the steps. Those can be found here.
Another Easter Treat! In essence these are just sugar cookies, but in my continued quest of flavor experiments, they are made with honey and culinary lavender extract. Very spring like. Also, I used India Tree “Nature’s Colors” Sanding Sugars which use things like beet juice instead of artificial colors.
The first things that I will say about this project is that it is time consuming, somewhat frustrating and at some point, you will be asking yourself why the heck you are doing it. But then the presentation wins out because they are very pretty. And tasty. Here is the deal … and I am mentioning this right away so you can plan for it … first you need to painstakingly poke holes and drain a dozen eggs of their content. This took me an hour (even though I have done this before and thus have “had practice”). Then you have to “wash” the insides of the eggs by soaking them in water and wiping them and shaking them somewhat dry. Once you’ve done all that, the actual making of the cake batter and filling them with a piping bag, and then baking seems minor. At any rate, it seemed like it was an all day affair. Was it worth it? Yeah, the “cupcakes” (which you can also just make regular cupcakes out of, of course) were yummy, the presentation is fun and I like them. So there.